Meycauayan

Shawn Argente walked into a locker room that had barely settled on its own name. He is the player the Meycauayan Marilao Gems are building their 2026 season around, and he arrived just as the franchise itself did — as a team still working out what it means to wear dark pink and blue for two cities it had never represented before.

The roots go back to 2018, when the club started life as the Muntinlupa Cagers, one of ten charter teams in the first season of the Maharlika Pilipinas Basketball League. That debut campaign ended in the finals, where the Cagers fell 1-3 to the Batangas City Athletics — a result that, for years, remained the high point of the franchise's history.

Everything else changed in 2026. New owners took over the club, moved it south into Bulacan, and rebranded it as the Meycauayan Marilao Gems, tying the team to Meycauayan and Marilao at once. It was the first relocation the league had seen, and it made the Gems only the second club to fly Bulacan's colours. Home games now split between the San Jose del Monte Sports Complex, which holds 5,000, and the Meycauayan Sports Complex.

The move also handed the club an instant rival in the Bulacan Kuyas, and the "Bulacan Derby" has quickly turned sharp — in August 2026 the Kuyas won it 91-80. There has been no championship since the relocation to measure against that 2018 run.

If one name still carries the old identity, it is Allan Mangahas, named to the All-MPBL First Team in 2019 while playing under the Muntinlupa banner — the player supporters point to when they talk about who the club used to be, before it became the Gems.